Hit and Miss
by Jaya Mitai
Summary: Written for the LJ sg1teamficathon back in December. Written for kelliferfic. Set in season 2. A perfect planet, with one little problem . . .


Disclaimer – Not mine. Owned by MGM. No money. Don't sue. Originally written for the LJ SG-1 Team Ficathon (username: sg1ficathon). It occurred to me, since it ALSO got nominated for some fancy award, I should probably actually archive it somewhere too. This seemed like the place!

Aaand, it's a shameless plug in an effort to get more interest in the team ficathon for next year! Go to Livejournal and search sg1ficathon to find yummy teamy goodness by lots of wonderful writers! After you read this, of course. : )

- . -

Title: Hit and Miss

Author: Jaya Mitai

Rating: PG-13 for violence and language

Written for: kelliferfic (also kelliferk)

Who wants: Jack losing faith in something, Daniel being captured, and Sam being wrong.

And doesn't want: No 'team as kids' stories.

Special thanks, once again, to my most wonderful beta-reader lullabyeleague, for her tireless prevention of Gratuitous Plot Re-Heating™, and who has since secured a Christmas SGA fic as a thank you for all her assistance. Word count comes to 15,600 without the disclaimer. (See? They're getting shorter! Go me!) kelliferfic, I'm so sorry that your present is so late, especially considering you were a backup for another author! Hopefully this is something like what you had in mind. )

- . -

"Move move move!"

He sprinted with the others, not looking back. He could hear them well enough. It sounded like every man in the village was thundering through the woods after them, and he realized with another burst of adrenaline that he probably wasn't far off the mark.

Every breath of the thin air seemed to sap strength from him, and he made an extra effort to hold every breath in just a split second longer, trying to absorb as much oxygen as he could from each lungful. They were pounding along in front of him, only a few yards ahead. Jack had had to physically drag Carter away, and he'd covered their escape.

Even if covering it had indicated a lot of firing worthlessly into the air and wasting bullets. The colonel had been trying to pressure him into the range for months, but he just hadn't made the time.

Now he was out of bullets, and running too hard to fumble with another clip. It was pitch black, and he was having a hard enough time finding his footing up the steep slope, let alone trying to load the gun without so much as looking at it. He put on an extra burst of speed as he saw Teal'c, ten yards ahead of the rest of them, dig his feet hard into the ground and turn. His staff weapon was armed – he was going to cover their retreat. They'd do that stair-stepping thing they did, each of them stopping at some predetermined point to fire and cover their teammates. Daniel dared to glance behind him, gauge their distance.

It was quite possibly the only reason he survived.

He had twisted at the waist, just trying to get a peripheral impression of the proximity of his pursuers, when he was struck so soundly in the shoulder that he could have sworn someone had just punched him.

He spun with the impact, barely keeping his feet and staring around him wildly as he tried to find his attacker. But they all seemed about thirty feet behind him. They were still sprinting for him, and as they gained he saw a flash of one figure standing rock-still behind the others, his bow raised but empty.

Empty as in no arrow.

Daniel stared at them a moment more, then looked down at himself.

The head and shaft of the bolt were protruding from his left shoulder about an inch and a half. He stared at it, fascinated by the tiny bits of flesh that clung to the bolt and the tip. The blood seemed very dark; of course, they were at a pretty high altitude so the air was thinner, it would take the blood longer to absorb enough oxygen to glow bright red-

His blood. His flesh.

Very shortly after that stunning bit of comprehension, Daniel realized he was falling. He landed on his face on something hard, and there was a crawling in his shoulder somewhat like a muscle spasm, deep and penetrating and foreign. A moment later the pain caught up with him.

He gritted his teeth, picking up his face and looking through the grass and dirt stuck to his glasses. Teal'c still had his staff weapon raised, his face registering surprise, and the colonel was just starting to turn around. He could feel the pounding of the feet behind him through the springy turf under his hands, and he knew, without even really analyzing their position or speed, that SG-1 would never get to him in time.

"Go." It sounded weak, he was winded and couldn't seem to get a breath. He leaned up on his right arm, trying to get back to his feet, but he had no strength. Jack had finished his turn, and Captain Carter was whirling around.

"Go!" He got a little more air behind it, but he wasn't sure they could hear him over the suddenly triumphant cries of the men almost on top of him.

There was another staff blast, and Daniel watched an arrow sail over his head towards the team. Carter was starting back for him, and he watched the colonel grab her vest for the second time that night.

He took a deep breath, lowered his head a little to get his throat open.

"Go! Go!"

Then they were on him.

He saw the team again only indistinctly between the flailing arms and legs of his attackers, but he was able to clearly make out the captain, struggling for all she was worth, and the colonel, his mouth right next to her ear, bellowing. Teal'c felled one of the men pinning him down, but another came to take his place, and then the blows started to fall.

It took Daniel a long time to realize they'd wrenched the arrow out.

He wished it had taken him longer.

- . -

"I don't care how much it looks like the 'Sound of Music', Carter. We're not singing."

Captain Carter hid a smile by turning her head, as though surveying the treeline they were approaching. "I would never suggest it, sir."

Jack opened his mouth, then glared at the back of her head. "Weren't there Nazis in that movie, anyway?"

"There were," Teal'c agreed, staring up at what looked for all the world like a two hundred year old, two hundred foot tall New England oak. It was nice to see a somewhat familiar-looking tree, even if mutantly large; it wasn't a given on their off-world missions.

Jack blinked, then looked at Teal'c. "When did you see the Sound of Music?"

He shifted his staff weapon to his other, well-muscled hand. "It was available in the base library."

"Have you finished with it yet?" Dr. Jackson was absently fussing with the leg holster of his service pistol. Jack made a mental note to drag Daniel back to the shooting range when they got back. It was getting painfully obvious he didn't have the comfort level with the weapon that he needed. "The library, I mean. I thought you said months ago that you were starting it in alphabetical order."

The big Jaffa shook his head slightly, still scanning the treelines, but O'Neill could see there wasn't much tension in his muscles. No need.

"I have recently begun the second season of a series about a warrior princess named 'Xena.'"

Daniel stared at him a moment, then scratched his left eyebrow and lengthened his stride a little to close the distance to Carter. "We have not one, but two seasons of Xena, and I can't get them to budget for 'Unraveling Mysteries of the Ancient Mayans'?"

"I think Teal'c might have graduated to prime time cable." Carter's hand was still on her P-90, but her face was relaxed as they entered the shade and relative cool of the trees. Considering the height of the hill they'd just climbed and the 80 degree day, the drop in temperature was welcome.

Jack pulled off his cap and wiped the sweat off his face. "Way ahead of you."

Three pairs of eyes swiveled in his direction.

"The Simpsons." Jack tried to make his tone sound scandalized, and jammed the cap back on, this time with the bill at the back of his head.

The stargate on planet P3X-182 had been placed in what Dr. Daniel Jackson had initially assessed as a 'spiritually significant position' directly at the top of the most emerald-colored hill Jack had ever seen. As soon as they'd stepped out of the gate they'd all stopped a moment to take in the breathtaking views.

Directly before them had been a gently rolling slope that came to rest at a slightly flatter plain, cut by a clear-looking stream that widened quickly into a small river as it reached the opposite side. Behind the gate had been more hills as unbelievably green as the one on which they had stood, and most of those eventually tapered into a wood that they couldn't, even from their elevated position, see any end to. To the north of the gate were a range of mountains, which the stargate hill had been merely the little toe of, covered in absolutely white snow and fluffy clouds shaped like bunnies.

Well, the one over to the right had been, a little bit. A lop-eared one.

Despite having traveled to dozens of worlds, most pre-industrialized, the pristine state of the environment never seemed to grow less stunning. It had led Carter to make her comment about the similarities between the planet and the movie, though he was sort of hoping to skip the Nazi part.

Actually, given that there had been no track leading up to the gate, and not a single structure on that plain, he wasn't even sure they were going to find a village, let alone a bunch of nuns. Not for the first time he wished they had some way of surveying the planets from the air. He knew the Captain was working on such a device, small enough to be launched through the Stargate but with enough power to get a decent look at the planet about 50 miles out of the gate itself. And he was happy to let her tinker in her lab. He just wished she'd crank that one out a little faster.

Not that walking around a perfect, apparently uninhabited planet was necessarily a bad thing.

But not necessarily a good thing, either. The planet had been on the Abydos cartouche, which meant that Ra had known its coordinates. If a goa'uld knew a planet's address and it seemed uninhabited, there was usually a reason.

But maybe it was as simple as lack of naquadah. After all, Earth didn't have any. Neither had that planet with the nice, quiet, naked white aliens, come to think of it.

"The Simpsons and Xena," Daniel repeated, a little flatly. "And here I always thought cable TV only corrupted the youth."

"Does not every episode of Xena end with a moral lesson?" Teal'c inquired, watching the canopy above them.

Jack reached out and touched one of the magnificent trees, the trunk easily as wide as a car. He moved around it, coming face to face with a kid, no more than fifteen, about twenty yards away.

The boy was in a crude fiber smock, otherwise shirtless, and wore soft skin boots. He also had an arrow nocked in his longbow, the slate tip pointing directly at O'Neill's face.

He stopped, instantly, and locked gazes with the boy. "Aaahhh . . . hello?"

He kept the pair of eyes pinned with his own, hoping their owner would prefer to stare him down than notice the sudden and sharp noise of a staff weapon arming.

Jack raised a hand, slowly, fist closed, to signal his team, but didn't take his eyes off the archer.

The boy didn't retreat, and he stared at O'Neill for some time before he finally blinked and broke eye contact, taking them all in. After a quick survey of them, and a lingering look at Teal'c, his eyes rounded back to the colonel.

"We're just passing through," Jack told him softly. "We're not looking for trouble."

He wondered if he could catch the arrow before it hit him. He suspected not.

"My name's Jack."

The boy uttered something sharp and vaguely familiar, and Jack inclined his head slightly to the left when Daniel responded in the same language. The boy's eyes flickered for a moment, then looked over O'Neill's shoulder. He said something else, and this time Jack was sure he heard the ancient Egyptian word for 'enemy.' He also very clearly heard the word for 'jaffa.'

He knew that one pretty well. There was only one word for 'jaffa.' It was 'jaffa.'

Daniel started up again, this time taking a bit longer, and Jack made out the word for 'friend' and 'village' as well.

Jack hadn't heard anyone speaking ancient Egyptian since Abydos.

The boy wrinkled his brows dubiously and surveyed them with a different, less angry expression, and Jack beamed at him in what he hoped was a friendly manner. The arrow-tip dropped a notch, and O'Neill realized he hadn't heard Teal'c disarm the staff weapon.

"Teal'c."

The weapon closed with a snap. Another second, and the arrow was relaxed on the string, and lowered to the ground.

Even Jack knew what he'd said then.

"Follow me."

Not that they'd had much choice, but if he'd known how it would go down . . .

Jack shook the memory of their arrival from his thoughts, his P-90 lying across raised knees, his back against the trunk of one of the enormous trees. They'd topped the hill well over a half-hour ago, and now that they were at the crest of it they'd see anyone coming for a mile. Teal'c was watching the other slope, just in case the villagers circled around, but Jack wasn't figuring on an attack.

Not tonight. Tonight they had what they wanted.

He let his head roll towards his right, where Captain Carter huddled against another enormous tree, watching the east and trying to determine when the sun would rise. As soon as Teal'c had checked out the southern slope and circled back to report, they'd formulate a plan. Not that they could act on it for a few hours; while Teal'c was protected by his symbiote from the thin air, he knew he couldn't expect his old knees to put in another three mile sprint for the next few hours minimum.

Of course, he should probably talk to Carter before Teal'c returned. Berating her in front of the big jaffa was only going to make her feel worse.

Not that he was actually certain he could make her feel worse than she probably already felt.

The image of Daniel's face came back, as though it had been burned against the back of his retinas, and Jack shook his head again and gained his feet, his thighs groaning tiredly at him.

Yeah, a three mile sprint a couple thousand feet above sea level should be added to the drill. He'd have to speak to the general about it when they got back.

She didn't turn or acknowledge his presence as he walked over and crouched beside her, still keeping an eye out. Her slope was even easier to watch than his, due to the lack of pesky trees. It was a steep, long stretch of now grey grasses, and it waved like an ocean as billows of wind scampered along it.

"Captain."

He hated this. He hadn't had to do this with an officer since Kawalsky, and he hadn't liked it much then, either. And unfortunately he didn't know her well enough to gauge her reaction. She was tough, she'd already proved that. She was smart. She'd figure out the damn crystal panel eventually. Maybe she already had. But he didn't need tough right now. He didn't need smart.

He needed an officer. He needed someone who could follow an order.

She turned to him, her eyes red and puffy but her face dry. "I estimate five hours until sunrise. Sir." Tight. Controlled. Angry. He could tell that immediately.

If she were Kawalsky, he would have hit her. As it was, he thought about shaking her until her teeth rattled.

"Thank you, Captain," he replied in the same tone, and watched her eyes hood. Good. "I assume you understand the chain of command, Captain? They did go over it once or twice in officers' school?"

"Yessir." Almost sarcastic.

"Then you understand that the proper response to receiving an order from a superior officer is to obey it. Yes or no, Captain?" he snapped after she didn't immediately reply.

Her lips thinned visibly, but her voice was the still barely controlled, angry snap. "Yessir."

Even better.

"You can disagree with my orders all you want, Captain, but the next time you refuse to carry one of them out, I will shoot you. Do you understand?"

"Yessir."

He glared at her a minute more, and she glared right back. It really was just like with Kawalsky. He needed to stop building teams with officers as bull-headed as he was.

Then again, General Hammond had assigned her without his knowledge.

Then again, that was how he'd ended up with Kawalsky.

Maybe he should actually start picking the officers instead.

He sighed, and lessened his glare somewhat. Her expression become one of wariness.

"What happened, Carter."

She looked stunned for a moment, then swallowed and tried to hide it by glancing down at the calculator in her hand as she stowed in it a pocket on the right leg of her BDUs. "There was no orange crystal, sir."

Jack digested that for a moment, refusing to let his expression change. It wasn't likely that Daniel had mistranslated.

"Did you try pulling the power crystal?"

His knowledge of goa'uld crystal technology was basic at best. He wasn't sure you could always just pull the power, but it worked with his office PC.

She shook her head, finally looking at him rather than glaring. "The crystals were charged, probably because the generator was still on." He noticed that she balled her hands into fists as she said it, and he wordlessly held out his hand.

She hesitated, and then shook her head. "It's not bad, sir-"

"Let me see." Not that he would really be able to tell much in a shaded grove in the middle of the night, but he could at least tell a second from a third degree burn. She hesitated again, and then extended her right hand. He reached out and turned it, palm up, and ran his thumb gently over her fingertips. Her hands were frigid, even the burns. But there were burns, no doubt about it. He could feel the raised blisters.

Not bad, but not great.

Jack released her hand, reaching into his vest for his first aid supplies. He knew there was burn cream in there somewhere, and he'd probably need those fingertips in the next six or so hours. He also pulled the light from the P-90 dangling around his neck, clicking it on and popping the end into his mouth.

She seemed mortified, but she let him treat the burns, and he spared her the bandaids. When he released her hand it was a little warmer, and she flashed him a halfhearted smile of thanks.

"We'll get him back, Captain."

Her expression closed again, and he almost cursed himself. He still didn't know quite how to handle her, and the night wasn't getting any younger.

"I know, sir. I just . . ." She let it trail off, then uncharacteristically bit her bottom lip. "I smashed the main processing crystal."

He recalled. She'd had her firearm by the muzzle and swung it down sharply as he'd bolted into the room, three of the villagers and a zat blast hot on his trail. It had been the look on her face when she'd analyzed the results of her work that had made him grab her by the vest and haul her towards the back door.

"It didn't bring the shield down, I take it."

She shook her head. "It should have," she added, a trace of her offended geek expression leaking through. "It should have blown the panel, actually."

He didn't recall a blown panel, and he shifted his weight from one knee to the other.

"I don't understand why this generator is so much different from the others we've seen," she finally almost exploded, turning to look at the slope, as though expecting the find the answer approaching stealthily. "I should have been able to divert the feedback and pull the power, without the processor the board should have shorted. If I'd had a few more seconds-"

"You'd be a prisoner or worse," Jack finished for her, in a deadly voice.

"Like Daniel?" she shot back, and he saw now the glare was back, and with it a glistening around her eyes. "We could have-"

"We couldn't," he said shortly, cutting her off. "We could not have held that position, Captain."

She didn't seem to appreciate his repeating of her rank, and it pleased him that it bothered her. "You didn't even try-"

She stopped when she saw the look on his face, but didn't drop her eyes.

"You're right," he said, as lightly as he could. "I saw a situation I couldn't help, and I acted to get the rest of my team out of harm's way."

She had the good sense not to respond, and after a moment he took a deep breath.

"So. We can assume Daniel will be taken to the same chamber as the control board to be judged. We have a decent lay of the temple, and an idea of the enemy and the number. I figure we can give you about three minutes in that chamber, no more. Can you bring the shield down in that amount of time, or not?"

Her eyes shifted, not to escape his but to run calculations. Her hand went to the pocket of her trousers, where she'd stowed the calculator, but her fingers stilled as she touched the Velcro that held it closed.

She looked back up at him, and her expression steeled. "Yessir."

Better. "Then that's our plan. They can't try him before sunrise. Try to get some rest."

He stood, smoothly despite his stiffness, and she looked up at him from her seat against the tree.

"Sir-"

"That's an order, Captain."

- . -

Air was being moved through the chamber, whether through architectural design or technology. He could hear it, flowing confidently into the chamber, taking in the monolith throne, the gold, and the feather. It hesitated then, swirling around near the ceiling to investigate the gaudy, enormous measuring device before losing speed and will, creeping towards the floor and gratefully escaping to the chamber next door.

Or maybe he was just projecting his own feelings on the air.

There was no avoiding it, the admittance of it. He was scared. Officially, unabashedly afraid. He could actually feel it, in the way his breathing was shallow if he ignored it, the way his neck was tensed, would tense again as soon as he stopped concentrating on relaxing it.

The cold wasn't helping.

And what made it worse was that he wasn't sure it really was actually cold in the chamber.

The temple was underground, so it was definitely going to be less susceptible to external temperature changes. And the night outside had been in the upper seventies, which wasn't really that hot. The leaves of the trees had been a vivid and light green, no reds or golds to indicate the coming of fall, so it was likely spring on the surface. That meant that the previous season had been winter, so the temple would be significantly cooler as the winter cold had finally seeped down to it to chill it.

That was why the smooth stone beneath his cheek was so cold. Because it was spring.

And it wasn't just beneath his cheek. His Adam's apple touched the floor every time he swallowed, his chest was pressed against it and frigid. Maybe it was a good thing, it was numbing, or maybe he was numb. Maybe because of the cold.

Maybe because he'd stopped bleeding.

It was cold, too. Cold and starting to thicken, maybe more than starting. It had seemed to still be moving, like a light fixture seems to move across the ceiling when you stare at it in the dark, unable to sleep. He watched it crawling towards the edges of the expertly laid stones, trying in vain to reach the small trenches between the precisely chiseled slabs of marble so it could gather itself, make an attempt for the door.

There was no one there to stop it, after all. Nothing breathed in the room with him save the torches.

They were the same torches that had burned there hours before, consuming some type of tree resin and leaving thick, tarry stains on the walls and ceilings of the audience chamber. But now they burned for no audience; just him, the throne, and the feather.

And the scale.

The scale was quite still, suspended in time above him. It should have crushed him, the weight of it had to be extreme. The body was covered in hieroglyphs, nothing more than a retelling of every Book of the Dead he'd ever seen. The journey of the soul down towards the underworld. Towards the weighing, where the crocodile-headed god waited to devour the souls of those found impure, those whose hearts weighed more than a single feather.

But the scale was perfectly even just now, no feather and no soul huddled on those frigid, glistening plates. They were tarnished on the bottom, he could see where fingerprints, entire handprints had dirtied the gold, indicating the brass they had mixed with it to be sure it would support the weight of a man.

For they could not weigh the soul of a man, not literally. They had to weigh the entire thing.

To compensate for this, of course, their crocodile god had provided. He had provided the feather, the bright-white, enormous feather, that even as he looked waved its ivory tentacles as the air crept around it.

He briefly closed his eyes, and then adrenaline surged through him again as he lurched against the burning cold stones that held him.

He couldn't close his eyes. It was too cold.

He lay now just over the panel. Where she'd been, knee-deep in the marble floor. He'd thought it ironic that the generator had been placed in this of all chambers, just beneath the scale, as though it awaited every decision as breathlessly as those that watched. For it was a large audience chamber, and Lett and his councilors would only have taken up the back wall. They would be prone, watching as one of their own, or perhaps someone from another tribe, was bound and tossed upon one of those glistening plates, and the feather would be laid gently opposite them.

And when gravity had taken its toll, Sobek would come from his throne, his garish, enormous gilded throne, and he would extend his hand, and consume the soul of the condemned one.

He fought his eyelids; they were heavy, and equally weighed down. They wanted to close, in resignation, in defeat, in exhaustion. Knowing his fate, to die at the end of a ribbon device, even that was not enough to strengthen him.

Even if he couldn't get out of the temple, he could at least try.

She'd tried.

She just hadn't known it wasn't going to work.

And he wondered, briefly, if that would have stopped her. Knowing when she'd begun the task that she was going to fail, would it have made a difference?

He thought no.

And then he thought of Sam.

Because she hadn't known, and then she had known. And both times she'd tried, with all her strength she'd tried.

He remembered.

He remembered the murderous look on her face, slightly tinged with indignation and quickly surfacing confusion as she had surveyed the results of her work. She'd clearly thought that smashing the control crystal was going to bring down the shield. She'd bet on it, she'd wagered their lives on the attempt.

But she hadn't known that, either. None of them had. Known the number of the enemy in the temple, known their weapons, known that there would be no orange crystal. No easy fix. But once she'd opened the panel, she'd seen for herself, she'd tried. He had been standing in the corner of the room, checking and rechecking his gun and afraid that every whisper of sound was going to be their discovery.

He'd been right. They had been discovered. And he'd told her, shouted it to her. And then O'Neill had come into the chamber, and seen the look on her face, and swooped into the center of the chamber where he now lay and grabbed her by the canvas vest. He'd hurled her at the door, and even as he followed them he had seen her glance back at the panel, as though there were just one more thing she wanted to try –

The panel had been hot. He remembered her curse and recoil, remembered seeing the spiteful sparks continuing to burn as they'd settled back towards the marble. They had burned her, but he could feel none of their heat now. Though he lay just above them, where they'd landed, the echo of their heat had died in this place long ago.

Even the echoes of those that had dragged him here were gone, and now it was silent.

His yell had been silent, deafening but inaudible. Jack had been screaming right in her ear but he hadn't heard it over the mob, over the voices and the motion and the buzz that was gone like the heat. He knew she'd known, like he had, that there was no way she'd get back to him. Not then.

But she'd tried.

But he knew she would. Get back to him. His fear was not blooming from a dread that he had been left there, left on the marble floor to be weighed. He'd known Carter a short time, but he knew the captain wouldn't leave him. None of them would.

And even knowing that, it didn't lessen his guilt at all.

That was his weight, and it pressed down on his heart so much that sometimes it didn't seem like he could possibly take another breath. She was so different from Carter, but she'd tried. He knew she had. Sha're hadn't just lain there, she'd fought. Now, after fighting Amonet all this time, maybe knowing she couldn't win, she tried. She was still trying.

And like him, she knew that he wouldn't leave her there, leave her trapped in her own body. He knew she knew. He would search every planet in the universe until he found her.

He would try.

And she knew. Like he knew.

But that knowledge didn't move the weight.

His blood was still now. It had stopped some five or six millimeters from the crevice between the stones, and no matter how long he watched it, it didn't budge. It reflected the torchlight less now, its surface becoming stickier, thicker. So close to its goal, but just short.

His eyes blinked, his eyelashes brushing against the lens of his glasses. He still had them, and he didn't know why. They should have fallen off, or maybe been broken. They still carried dirt, from the outside. Carried earth to the underworld.

It would have been funny if it weren't so cold. He might have even laughed a little.

But he didn't. He listened.

It wasn't silent anymore.

It took him a while to figure out what the sound was, and by the time he'd gathered some semblance of lucidity the words were past, and he heard only their echo.

But the eyes, the face, he saw that. He had to lift his head up a little to see, relax his neck just a little.

He didn't like them at all, and he closed his eyes.

And he was afraid.

He was afraid that one day, it was going to be her.

- . -

Teal'c waited until O'Neill moved away from the captain before he approached. It was easy to determine the reason and the topic of the conversation he had had with Captain Carter, and it had seemed prudent to allow them to discuss the situation without an audience.

He knew these warriors, now. Better perhaps than he had known any humans. They were not unlike Jaffa, really. The difference was their teamwork was not based on fear of the anger of an ancient master, but love and loyalty to one another.

It made the sacrificing of Daniel Jackson difficult, even for him.

But the young man – his friend, he admitted quietly to himself – would not be executed this night. That was not a concern. If he survived long enough, he would be held for judgment by Sobek, possibly for days.

If he had survived his injury. If they gave him medical attention in order to keep him alive long enough for Sobek to return.

Then again, there had been no jaffa. There was no guarantee that Sobek was returning on the schedule they had been given.

There was no guarantee that Sobek was returning at all.

Thus no guarantee that those that had taken him would see any reason to prolong his life.

He cast his mind back to earlier in the evening, searching his memory as he searched the darkness for signs of followers. They were not being hunted, having been sated by the capture of Daniel Jackson, and would not be pursued until morning.

He was certain of that.

So his mental pursuit was the best prediction he could offer as to the enemy's future activities.

By the time Colonel O'Neill had collected the captain and returned to the village, a definite change had occurred. Perhaps it was the coming of night.

He doubted it.

The village had pretty much shut down, various fires burning quietly in more of the mudded, roofless structures. He had watched them stretch canvases, made of the same coarse fiber as the smocks, across the tops of the homes that were currently in use.

Doubtless the canopy kept out any bad storms, and the huge trees protected the forest-dwelling people from high winds. Even in the worst hurricane the driving rain would be gentled to a shower by the time it hit the dirt ground of the woods.

Daniel Jackson was crouched inside the main structure, the only one with a solid limestone roof. The roof was almost pyramid-shaped, nothing more than a sloped chimney with a hole where the tip would be, to allow the smoke to exit. It was where Daniel Jackson originally met the Elders, and he was still meeting with them now.

He doubted that was a promising sign, either, and gently ran the tip of his thumb down the shaft of the staff weapon.

One of the men – Teal'c remembered his name as Lett – was on his feet and almost screaming out a tirade at the assembled men. Daniel Jackson was on his knees, his hands open and held palm-out, in a classic supplication gesture. His expression was that of a man afraid that at any moment he was going to be mobbed. None of the other elders were moving, but their expressions indicated they were just as unhappy as Lett.

Captain Carter's voice was barely audible over the screaming of the village leader. "What's going on here, sir?"

Teal'c watched Colonel O'Neill relax his jaw with visible effort, and debated again whether or not to extract Daniel Jackson from the meeting by force.

"Daniel was asking the elders if they knew anything about your force shield."

Teal'c watched Captain Carter raised an eyebrow, brushing aside a little rivulet of sweat with the bottom joint of her thumb. O'Neill had been correct in his assumption that Captain Carter would choose to run back from the gate, and he re-evaluated his first estimation of the humans' exertion limitations in this environment.

He was fairly confident that he could use the captain as a baseline for all of them. He knew she was fit. She could almost beat him in a footrace.

If he was not exerting himself overly.

"I take it they don't know anything?"

O'Neill glanced again at the building, where Lett was still bellowing, and Teal'c knew he was having similar thoughts of extraction.

"I'd say they know all about it."

Teal'c found himself in agreement, and nodded to them both as they passed him. He was standing beside the crude entrance of the rough mud home they had been led to when they had first arrived, and besides tending the fire he had merely waited and watched Daniel Jackson attempt to obtain information from the villagers. O'Neill's observation had been very keen; while O'Neill had left nearly an hour ago to meet Captain Carter at the edge of the woods, and had missed the past hours' deliberations, it was very clear that they were extremely uncomfortable with the topic as soon as Daniel Jackson had put it forth. The past half-hour had included the name of a minor goa'uld, Sobek, and a great deal of common, conditioned responses.

It was not long after O'Neill and Captain Carter had returned when Daniel broke away from the meeting, eyes on the somewhat sloped ground as he padded his way back towards their hut. His eyesight had been ruined by the bright fire that had burned before the elders, and the young man was nearly on top of him before he looked up.

He looked as though he'd just stumbled out of a Final Challenge.

"Jesus, Teal'c!" There really wasn't much physical startling, but his voice sounded a good deal more animated than his physical carriage.

"I apologize. Are you well, Daniel Jackson?"

He received a ghost of a smile as well, and then the Tau'ri anthropologist and archeologist had passed him, into the main, single chamber of the mud hut.

Teal'c chose to wait outside a few moments longer. If his appearance had been that startling to one that knew him well, it would perhaps dissuade others from approaching to continue their previous argument.

"It went that well?" O'Neill's voice was deceptively chipper.

He heard the sound of a body dropping onto the earth, without much attempt to make the landing gentle. "We can't enter the temple." There was a noise like fabric being scuffed. "They're pretty adamant about that."

"We gathered. Any reason why?"

"It would desecrate the entrance to the Underworld and damn their souls and the souls of all their people for eternity, for a start," Daniel Jackson muttered, and more shifting noises were heard. "Also, apparently the doorway to the temple is guarded by jaffa."

Teal'c gave the evening one last, deadly glare, and ducked silently into the hut. O'Neill would shortly be requesting his knowledge of such things, and while he did not believe the natives spoke English, it would be a good idea nonetheless to keep his voice low.

"So I take it they didn't tell you where the entrance to the temple was."

O'Neill was sitting with his back against the south wall, which gave him a decent view out the doorway into the dwelling the council had taken place. He looked quite comfortable, which Teal'c knew well was an illusion, and he found that the colonel's tell-tale signs of tension were all readily apparent; his main weapon on the ground, angled for instant pick-up and use, the snap that held his secondary weapon in place was undone to allow quicker access, and his thumb and forefinger were rolling as though he were pantomiming handling a small, cylindrical object.

Daniel Jackson shook his head exhaustedly in reply to O'Neill. He had thrown himself on the ground on the opposite side of the fire as O'Neill, with no view of the village out of the doorway, and no attempts made to arm or ready himself for battle. He had raised his left leg and was carefully rubbing his knee, which accounted for the sounds of movement. Considering he had been using his knees to support his weight for over three hours, Teal'c was not surprised that his knees would be tender.

"How many?" Captain Carter was looking more rested, her eyes bright as she dug into a pack to prepare their pre-packaged dinners. Considering the way the meeting with the villagers had gone, he would have refused any offertory and he was fairly sure both the Captain and O'Neill were thinking along the same lines.

"They didn't say. I gather they don't go near the temple unless they are summoned by Sobek." Daniel Jackson carefully lowered his left leg and raised his right, massaging that knee in turn. The firelight glinted slightly off his spectacles, and Teal'c was again reminded of all of the services his symbiote provided, that all Jaffa took for granted.

It was so long since he had suffered soreness stemming from being seated, or felt lightheaded from thin air, or could not see, hear, smell, taste, and touch that he had nearly forgotten it was common among his teammates. It was common knowledge that the slaves felt these maladies, but it had also been so long since he had thought of these Tau'ri in the same context as the human slaves that the idea seemed equally alien.

They sat in silence for a moment, only the crackling fire and the hiss of steam leaving their cooking MREs cut the silence.

"We cannot wait for Sobek's return," Teal'c finally volunteered. He felt as though they were waiting for his opinion. "Even if the village did not give away our presence," and it was doubtful such loyal followers would not, "the stargate is on the top of a hill from which all the land nearby is visible. It would be impossible to ambush them."

And there would be reinforcements on the ha'tak. Although the ring platform was most likely inside the temple, which would keep their reinforcements from getting to the gate as speedily as they might otherwise. And a glider launched from space would still need several minutes to penetrate the planet's atmosphere and lend assistance in such an instance.

"Can we dial the gate manually?"

Teal'c did not answer. The question was not aimed at him.

"The DHD is intact, sir. The inner ring is locked while there's still power."

And they could not disable the power to the dialing device because of the energy shield that surrounded the

DHD and protected it.

"If the villagers are afraid to approach the temple, there will likely not be a heavy guard around the entrance," Teal'c offered again, as Captain Carter moodily poked at the MREs with a charred stick. "If Sobek has left jaffa here at his temple, it will be only a small number, to repel the curious and imprison those that speak or act out against their god."

Of course, attempting to take the ha'tak with an army of four was almost as ill-advised as trying to attack a party of jaffa on high ground with no cover.

"And we all agree a gouldy temple is the most likely place to have the power generator for this shield?"

Carter had crouched down and was stretching her Achilles tendon. "Daniel, did they say how Sobek collected the naquadah?"

Daniel Jackson shook his head, still rubbing his sore kneecaps. "No, but since these people haven't mastered metallurgy, it's got to still be in raw ore form. They'd almost have to take it out via the gate."

The captain frowned, her expression turning thoughtful. "Probably not the main generator, sir. That's a pretty significant distance to have to run the power." At his dark look, she continued hastily, "But there would likely be at least a control board of some kind, to allow him to bring the shield down so his jaffa could use the gate if necessary."

"So our boy holds court in his temple, has the naquadah brought to the gate, lets his jaffa leave and come back, and then beams out again?"

It was the nickname he'd given the ring platform technology, and no one bothered to correct him. Teal'c had been advised that similar technology had been named 'beaming' on a classic science fiction show on the Tau'ri planet, and while the base library had once had several seasons of something called 'Star Trek' their copies had been retained by a patron some time ago.

"It is likely, O'Neill." There would be no reason to transfer huge quantities of raw naquadah by ha'tak back to a manufacturing planet. It would be far too inefficient a process, and no goa'uld he had ever known had been particularly patient.

"So, Teal'c, how many jaffa can we expect Sobek to have left behind?"

Teal'c considered for a moment only. "Perhaps five or six." Possibly human guards as well, but with a population this controlled, it was unlikely the first prime would sacrifice so many jaffa to guard a fairly secure temple, especially for a minor goa'uld. Sobek's entire jaffa army would be small even by the Tau'ri standards, and he would not be able to afford to permanently station many more jaffa than that.

"Carter, think you can locate this thing and turn it off?"

She leaned back up, staring into the fire for a moment. "I think so, sir. I imagine that the control board is like the rest of the goa'uld crystal technology. We pull the main power crystal, and theoretically it should shut down."

Jack grimaced. "See, I hate it when you say 'theoretically,' because then I ask 'or what' and you give me bad news like-"

"The generator might overload and explode, sir."

"- that," he finished disappointedly. "And, since the generator could 'theoretically' be in the temple –"

"We'd all blow up," Daniel finished.

"See, that doesn't sound like fun to me."

Teal'c silently agreed with him.

A quiet fell again as they all contemplated their options, and Teal'c again brought his attention to the village outside. He had not heard the footsteps, and chided himself. It was the second time that particular boy had walked so softly that his footfalls were inaudible. This time the jaffa had sensed his gaze, and he stared at the pair of eyes, attached to a somewhat shadowed face watching him from about twenty yards.

Kya was making a show of dumping a pail full of ashes into a common pile near the center of the village, and he lingered long over the task, watching the Tau'ri.

"Daniel, did you figure out how long a moon was?" O'Neill sounded thoughtful again, which was out of character for him. It usually indicated worry.

"Four days."

So the goa'uld Sobek visited the planet by ha'tak or gate a little more frequently than once a month to pick up the naquadah supply. It indicated two things; he was a very minor goa'uld indeed, with few planets under his rule, and his jaffa army was likely even smaller than Teal'c had originally anticipated.

Perhaps taking the ha'tak was actually possible.

O'Neill had followed Teal'c's gaze, and the jaffa was torn between watching the boy and watching this leader among the Tau'ri. He knew that O'Neill had once had a son, and that the child had died. Little more was explained, but he needed little to understand the expression he saw now on the warrior's face. His soul would crawl inside itself into a point so infinitesimally small that his symbiote would recognize it as a foreign body and consume it whole if Rya'c died.

He knew this because it had nearly happened.

And while he knew little of Abydos save what he saw when he freed the Tau'ri from slaughter after the choosing, he remembered, very dimly, O'Neill's struggle when Skaara was chosen as the host of Aphophis' son, Klorel. He had not been paying proper attention, dismissing the response as another impotent gesture from another doomed slave. But he did not forget O'Neill's behavior when Apophis' attack on Earth was thwarted, and he did not forget the man's face when he had dealt with the Abydonian boy.

Skaara was in many ways a surrogate son for O'Neill, and the same gentleness that the colonel had used, only with that boy and with the girl Cassandra, lined his eyes now as he watched Kya.

And there was little doubting their physical similarities. Both were awkward, very curious while trying to maintain an uninterested and dangerous air, and both had the potential to live free of the goa'uld.

This village was small, and their goa'uld much weaker than Apophis. O'Neill could not free Abydos, not completely. Not yet. But it would be possible with this village. Sobek was no Apophis. And while Teal'c knew that O'Neill would never give up on Skaara, nor would he ever replace him, he would always seek out a Skaara in all the primitive worlds, in all the primitive villages, and that boy would be his symbol, his reason for carrying on.

Just as Teal'c had his own symbol, carried in gold upon his forehead.

After a while, O'Neill raised his hand and gestured at the boy, then indicated a spot near their campsite with a jerk of his chin.

Kya eventually caught on, and approached them carefully. The boy paused at the doorway, glanced at him, then his eyes slid to the campfire, where Captain Carter was pushing the cooked MREs out of the flames. He imagined the smell was quite unlike what the villagers were used to eating, though not necessarily more appetizing. He knew Captain Carter had not prepared enough food to accommodate five, but the same thought had occurred to Daniel Jackson. The younger man glanced at the doorway, then up at Captain Carter.

"Thanks, but I'm not hungry." He went back to lying flat on his back, staring up at the sky, and Teal'c estimated it would take the archeologist another ten minutes to fall asleep.

It would be better to let the man rest than eat. He could consume a ration bar later, on the way to the temple. For it was clear that was where O'Neill had decided to push.

And he had no disagreement with such a plan.

Teal'c pushed the refused MRE towards the doorway, where Kya still lingered, and finally seated himself, still relatively close to the doorframe, to eat his own. O'Neill leaned up, snagged his with a nod of thanks at the captain, and indicated the last black plastic tray to Kya.

"It's yours," he said in ancient Egyptian. His time away from Abydos had not helped his accent. Teal'c managed to keep his expression from changing, but both Dr. Jackson and Kya broke into sudden grins.

Daniel Jackson repeated O'Neill's words, with inflection on the proper syllable, and Kya nodded his head several times, smiling and daring to take a seat just within the threshold of the mud hut.

"What did I say?"

"You said, 'It's shovel.'"

"Shovel?"

"A kind of trowel, actually. It's a lot like the word for yours." Daniel Jackson chuckled to himself and settled back against the dust.

O'Neill was silent after that. Kya picked up the tray, watching Teal'c closely as the jaffa freed the plastic fork from its pocket on the left side of the tray, and then the boy suddenly realized O'Neill was watching him. Kya made a show of ignoring Teal'c, eyeing the fork for a few seconds before unclipping it from the plastic. He'd already seen the jaffa stabbing a piece of what, on closer inspection of his own dinner, turned out to be sliced turkey breast, and the boy sniffed it with a very dubious expression before putting it in his mouth.

The chewing of the turkey was even more suspicious, and Teal'c hid a brief smirk of satisfaction as the colonel began to looked more carefully at his dinner . He took a bite, then shrugged.

Teal'c ate his dinner quietly. It wasn't wonderful, but it wasn't terrible. It would be sufficient to get them through the night and raid ahead.

It would be that night. Of that Teal'c was certain. Even with an eight-day grace period, O'Neill would not wish them to chance any jaffa left to watch the village becoming aware of their presence and signaling their master. He would strike before the villagers would think to maintain a higher guard around the temple. Also, he would want them to realize their god was false as soon as possible, even if he could not arm and train them before Sobek returned for his next shipment.

After discovering that everything, including the wet-bread stuffing and creamed corn, was not poison, Kya ate animatedly, looking between the four of them brightly. Again, Teal'c saw a certain vulnerability in the colonel's eyes, and again, he considered what it meant.

Their team orders were intelligence. These slaves had a naquadah mine, and little else. The SGC could not use the mine until Sobek had been destroyed, and they hadn't brought enough explosive to destroy a ha'tak. The arming of the Abydonian people had been a last-ditch effort by O'Neill to save his team as much as it had been to free the Abydonian people. With more planning, it was very probable they could assassinate this goa'uld and free the village.

Whether O'Neill believed it could be done in one night was a question that troubled him, for he did not have a ready answer.

As if his thoughts had been aloud, the colonel answered them. "Not this trip," he told the boy softly, and turned back to his dinner.

Teal'c wasn't sure if Kya had heard him, but when he saw Daniel's head roll in the boy's direction, he knew the archeologist had. The jaffa briefly closed his eyes. Of course. If O'Neill found the place reminiscent of Abydos, Daniel Jackson must be seeing his missing wife Sha're behind every tree in the forest.

He hid his feelings of guilt quietly, opened his eyes, and returned to alternating between eating and watching the village.

"Kya, did you grow up in this village?"

The boy switched his attention from O'Neill to Dr. Jackson, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as he could without choking.

"Yes."

"And you go to the temple whenever your god calls?"

"No, only a few may go and watch the judging."

Daniel Jackson nodded tiredly, as though he understood to what judging the boy referred.

"So you've never been inside the temple?"

Kya swallowed loudly. "I have. I am the son of Lett. I will take his place when he is gone." There was a tone of pride in the words.

"And so . . . you have joined him before, but not all the time?"

"I have duties within the temple. I sweep the paths after the council has gone."

It was not unusual for the human slaves to have such tasks. They would be far below the small jaffa guard.

"And you have seen your gods' soldiers? Jaffa, like Teal'c?"

Teal'c imagined that Daniel Jackson was gesturing at him, and he looked up, watching the boy impassively. Kya met his eyes, then ducked his head quickly.

"Yes."

"Do you always see them one at a time, or have you seen many at once?"

"I – I have seen many. They make the men haul the stone down the hill to the chappa'ai."

"How many stay in the temple always?"

The boy shrugged, still refusing to meet Teal'c's gaze. He eventually brought his eyes back to his meal, lest his stare intimidate the boy into discontinuing the conversation.

"A few. I do not know." Kya had finished his food, and seemed unsure what to do with the tray. "Why do you ask such questions? Do you not also worship Sobek?"

"Ah. Not exactly? When the jaffa lead your village down to the chappa'ai to send the stone through, do they ever . . . have trouble?"

"You mean the Breath of the Gods? No. They're jaffa." He said it as though Daniel Jackson had just uttered something incredibly stupid.

Which he had, Teal'c noted. He should have told his friend of the common name of the shield technology. Then again, it hadn't occurred to him. Normally that technology was used to encompass the entire gate and a small area around it, not simply the DHD. No, clearly Sobek didn't want to restrict access to the planet. He merely meant to prevent escape.

"Ah. Of course. Does Sobek go with them to . . . wave it aside?"

"No. He remains in the temple, always. He appears there when he wishes, and he leaves when he wishes."

Kya had gained some confidence, stemming from his ability to answer such simple questions, and was using more inflection. It was a good strategy, Teal'c admitted. The boy would soon be brazen and might reveal something he would otherwise guard around strangers.

"Is there a ceremony that Sobek performs before the jaffa take your men down to the chappa'ai?"

"The Judging. He weighs the souls of the untrue against –"

"I meant after that," the archeologist interrupted apologetically.

Kya stared at him, then shrugged, finally deciding to put down the tray rather than hold it. "There are some words, then the jewel on his hand glows, and the jaffa leave the temple." He was staring at the place he had set the tray, as though considering his next words quite carefully.

"But sometimes, when our god does not come with his jaffa, they cause the floor of the temple to open, and they find the orange jewel there, that matches the one that our god wears upon his hand. They pick it up and raise it in worship of his doing so, and then they close the floor again."

Daniel Jackson sat up suddenly, staring at Kya as though he'd never seen a transplanted human on an alien world before.

"Jack, Kya says he knows how to lower the force shield."

He immediately had the camp's attention. Kya noticed it as well, scooting back a foot while trying to make the retreat appear like nothing more than a casual rearrangement of his legs. It was clear he was afraid he had just spoken too much.

"Go on . . ." O'Neill's prompt was soft. Nonthreatening.

"His father, Lett, is on the council that goes to audience with Sobek."

"We knew that." Jack kept his voice soft.

"His father has taken him several times, since council seats are passed by relation in this culture," Daniel went on, looking at Kya, who was feeling uncomfortable with the staring again and ducking his head. "He has chores within the temple. Normally, before Sobek sends the jaffa off to move the naquadah, he uses a ribbon device to take down the shield."

"That's great, Daniel. Assume we don't have one of those." O'Neill's tone was getting slightly more dangerous, and Kya's breathing was starting to shallow and increase in frequency. Teal'c readied himself to catch the boy if he decided to run.

"Sometimes Sobek doesn't ring down to perform ceremonies. On these occasions, before the jaffa order the villagers to carry the naquadah down to the gate, they touch a stone panel in the floor of the audience chamber, and take what he called an 'orange jewel.'"

Carter was staring at them, very alert. "A control crystal?"

Daniel shrugged. "He described it like . . . the stone in the center of a ribbon device."

"Have you figured out where the temple is yet?" They knew it was underground, since Kya had told them that on the way up, but they hadn't passed anything remotely like a temple door built into the hillside on their way to the village. Teal'c was relatively certain they could find it, but not necessarily quickly enough to take advantage of it this night.

"Kya, can you take us to the temple of Sobek? We must speak with him."

Kya stared very hard at the empty black tray, and Teal'c wondered what the giving of food meant to this culture. He seemed too intelligent to purposefully put himself in the debt of strangers –

"I will take you there, if you will help us. Help us kill Sobek." Kya looked up jerkily, as though startled by his own words. "You worship the Snake-god. Your jaffa is his." He stared very hard at Teal'c, who stared back, still ready to capture the boy if he should try to alert the village. "The gods have fought. Sobek will not let us write it, but it is so. In his own temple it tells of how he killed Set. I will show you the temple if you will call upon the Snake-god to help us be free."

For a moment the boy was confident, chest puffed out and eyes bright. They dimmed slightly at Daniel Jackson's expression.

"Kya, we . . . we don't worship Apophis. He's a false god. So is Sobek. Teal'c was once his jaffa, but has been freed-"

"Then free us!"

"It's . . . not quite that simple-"

Kya's bravado faltered, and he folded his arms across his chest tightly, glaring defiantly.

"If you will not help us, I will not help you."

Daniel Jackson closed his eyes, clearly suppressing a groan.

"Daniel?"

The archeologist opened his eyes again, and set his jaw. "He knows the way, but won't take us unless we help him."

The colonel stared at the anthropologist. "Help him what."

Daniel Jackson gave him a long, steady look, and O'Neill scowled, clearly having retained enough of the Egyptian language to have followed along. "We don't have the arms-"

"I explained that. He's not budging."

Teal'c clearly remembered every line on the man's face, his barely concealed curiosity, his plainly visible exasperation. He did not allow his mind to dwell on the more recent image of him, prone upon the ground as he was overrun by a mob of those villagers he sought to rescue from the rule of a goa'uld.

Instead he proceeded towards O'Neill, making enough noise that the warrior would hear his approach.

The colonel looked up, then nodded once, and Teal'c advanced until they were only a foot apart. He carefully watched over O'Neill's shoulder, and noted the colonel was doing the same for him.

"We must reconsider their words, O'Neill."

"You mean lies? Yeah, that occurred to me too." The tone was hard, the worry plain.

"There is no guarantee that the goa'uld Sobek is not already here, or will return again to this planet."

"No. They're still mining the naquadah. They wouldn't keep it up if they weren't putting it somewhere." O'Neill shifted, lifting each leg in turn to stretch the muscles of his thighs. "I think it's safe to say he's still around."

Teal'c was silent. The logic was sound.

"Teal'c, did you see any jaffa?"

"I did not."

"Me neither, see, and that bugs me."

It was not as worrying as other facets of the temple. The village was quite small, and Sobek was minor at best. The goa'uld could not spare jaffa for securing such a small planet.

"Their warriors are skilled but primitive, O'Neill. A sufficient display of power would intimidate them."

The colonel paused, his head cocked as though he'd heard something. He remained in that position for quite some time before he frowned and spoke.

"We're pretty low on explosives and I'd like to save them for the shield, in case –" He didn't finish the sentence and he didn't need to. "Any other ideas?"

Teal'c tilted his head consideringly, noting sound and motion on his left.

There was one thing he had noticed, outside of the temple, that might be of use.

- . -

Sam didn't move until she was sure there was no chance of seepage.

She hadn't cried since –

Great tactic there, she growled to herself, as old pain ached against the new guilt. She'd only been with them a little over a year. Too long to have made a mistake like that.

It just didn't make any sense! They'd never encountered a charged power crystal before. It wasn't as though there were really that much juice running through the panel. A few sparks when she pulled it free, sure. But burns? Why was it so hot?

Unless it was already malfunctioning?

The thought was new, it blossomed in her mind like vinegar poured over baking soda. Unless the panel was malfunctioning.

Why? It would have been in working order –

Until she'd started rearranging crystals. What if the changes of positions and the leads she'd run had had effect after all? There'd been no visible change to the panel that she'd noticed, but what if there had been a change that she hadn't noticed? What if the board kept the previous configuration in memory for a certain length of time? It would make sense, considering the panel didn't have to be powered down to allow for configuration changes.

And so maybe the panel had been in the process of overloading when she'd tried to pull the power crystal. That's why it had been hot, that's why it had burned her, and that's why the crystal hadn't come free.

But then the panel would have blown.

Only it didn't, because before it could she'd shattered the control crystal.

Sam ground her teeth, keeping an ear cocked to her right.

So now she couldn't put the crystals back in the right order, because she'd destroyed the processor. The panel was as good as broken.

. . . which probably meant that the shield that had encased the DHD was also down.

She closed her eyes briefly, then pushed herself to her feet and jogged over to where the colonel and Teal'c were deep in discussion. She saw the colonel tilt his head in her direction, but he didn't pause in his conversation.

"Any other ideas?"

He acknowledged her only after Teal'c was silent, his head cocked in the manner he sometimes did when he was considering asking about some human custom he found confusing.

"I thought I gave you an order, Captain."

"Yessir. It's just that –"

He turned from Teal'c to give her a look, and she almost wouldn't meet his eyes, afraid it would be disappointment.

But it wasn't. It was more open-minded than she ever would have thought, given his tone. It simply said "This better be good, or I will shoot you."

"Sir, I think the shield protecting the DHD is down."

His expression didn't change, but Teal'c turned towards her with a raised eyebrow.

"Down? As in, not up?"

She nodded, considering telling him her thought process before realizing that he simply wouldn't care. Not right at this second, anyway.

Probably never, actually, so long as it was down.

The look he gave her then was long, considering, and heavy, and she knew exactly what he was thinking.

Are you sure?

And was she?

It had been so exciting, it was the first theory she had that made sense. She could have kicked herself as she watched his eyes, waiting for the question, wondering if he was even going to ask it.

She should have thought it through. After all, she'd been so damn sure when they'd touched the panel that hung just beneath the decorative metal pendulum. Sure as soon as the marble had slid past her fingertips that this shield was going to come down and they were going to at least have the opportunity to dial out. Get reinforcements, maybe, or simply take it down permanently so that when Sobek returned he couldn't re-erect it to prevent their escape if their assassination attempt failed.

She'd wanted it desperately, because he'd wanted it.

They both had.

Not that the colonel ever would have said anything, ever would have issued the order. But she'd seen him. The whole camp had, even Daniel. It was why he'd started asking Kya about the shield in the first place.

She had no idea what type of relationship they'd had before she'd joined the team, before there had been an SG-1. Just the reports. Just enough to know that O'Neill and his team had lied to ensure that Dr. Jackson could remain on Abydos, happily living the life he had studied for so long.

Happily living his life with Sha're.

She'd felt more than a twinge of guilt over the past year for thinking badly of him when she'd read the edited reports. The anthropologist taking advantage of the culture and the despicable way in which they'd offered him a girl as though she were a tract of land, a piece of meat, a service rendered to please him. That he'd taken her into the tent and discovered that she could 'read.' She'd remembered her mouth curling to the side as situations in which 'use my daughter for your pleasures' had become 'teach me Egyptian' played out in her mind, each as unlikely and disgusting as the last. As though anyone, particularly someone as lonely as this Dr. Jackson had to have been, would be so altruistic.

The thought caught in her throat, because she knew now that there was no other possibility.

Daniel had opened the Abydos gate. He carried so much of the blame for what had happened to Sha're. And Teal'c, the jaffa that had chosen her and marched her to Apophis, she knew he must feel some responsibility. He never spoke of it.

He was like her, in a way. They just didn't quite know how deep and how far the relationship between Daniel Jackson and Jack O'Neill really went. And likely neither of the men really did, either.

It made her realize, despite her anger and her own guilt, how hard it must have been for the colonel to pull her back, considering he was using so much of that strength to do the same to himself.

It also made her realize how hard Kya's betrayal had hit him. If it had really hit him yet.

And it was a betrayal. There was no way the boy could have been so misinformed. Oh, they could choose to look at it that way. He had led them to the temple directly, so assuredly, that it had been obvious he had made the journey more than once before. But it was always possible he'd simply followed his father there for the audiences with Sobek, and had never actually been inside.

Possible. But not probable.

Not as probable as her theory being correct. Not as probable as the panel laying, dark and dormant, under the marble floor. Where it was very probable Dr. Jackson was now.

Not as probable as the fact that Daniel might have already –

"I'm sure, sir."

He hadn't asked yet, but she answered him anyway.

And for one excruciating moment, she thought he wasn't going to trust her. God knew she deserved it.

"Good." His tone wasn't necessarily soft, nor necessarily approving, but it wasn't angry, either. Tension she didn't know she was holding in her gut relaxed slightly.

They could get him tonight. They could go back for him right now.

Clearly the two men had come to the same conclusion. "The gate is visible from the treeline," Teal'c rumbled consideringly.

O'Neill nodded. "Carter, you hoofed it back pretty quick after you found the DHD was shielded?"

She nodded. "Yessir. Walking time from the treeline to the gate was 1:15, time back at a jog was forty." It was about three miles to the gate, but of course running uphill took more effort. "I estimate running flat-out back to the gate to be twenty, twenty-five."

It would be more, though, because they'd have to carry Daniel.

But he didn't really need those numbers. He'd already concluded that reinforcements were out. Anyone out looking for them would see the gate activating. It was just a question of how quickly they could get out. Being at the top of the hill would give the villagers' bows a significantly greater range.

And, of course, one of them minimum had a zat. There was no telling if there were staff weapons somewhere in that temple as well.

"Carter, head back to the village." She opened her mouth but he didn't even slow down. "Take a couple bricks of C4 with you. I want the village occupied and enough of a diversion to draw as many of those folks out of the temple as we can get. Try to avoid casualties."

She swallowed her protest and even managed a fairly even "Yessir." It was to be expected, that he wouldn't want her in there-

"As soon as you set the charge, head back to our position. Will you be able to tell by looking at the panel-"

"Yessir."

"Good. Go. Teal'c, you're with me."

- . -

"I believe that will be sufficient, O'Neill."

Those kooky Jaffa. Always understating things.

Sufficient wasn't the word he would have used. Overkill was close. If she were Kawalsky, he would have suspected she was compensating for something.

But she was Carter. He knew damn well she was compensating, and why.

Didn't prevent the show from being any less impressive.

Rather than take out a few of the mud huts, which he'd assumed she would do, she decided to go for something that would be more plainly visible from the temple entrance. It was, after all, almost a mile from the village. He was counting on the noise and the vibrations from the explosions to alarm those villagers inside the temple.

The storage area for the mined naquadah had been between the town and the temple, directly on the top of a hill that led fairly directly to the hill where the gate stood. The first explosion had been past that dump, and it had disturbed the tree canopy visibly.

She hadn't blown up a hut. She'd blown up a tree.

The huge-trunked tree easily weighed over two tons, and the earth under his feet had trembled with the weight of its crash.

In itself, it probably would have been sufficient.

The second explosion, however, made the tree look like a pebble hurled from a child's slingshot.

She'd blown the naquadah dump.

Just a part of it, actually, or he was pretty sure the hill the temple had been built into would have collapsed. If he hadn't seen the work that had gone into the temple when he'd been stalking through it, trying to cover her and track down the jaffa that had supposedly been protecting it, he would have chided her for being irresponsible.

But it hadn't been built by these tree-dwelling people. Those stones had been cut by artisans. Sobek had imported them from a land where rock was cut regularly.

He might have even taken them from Abydos.

He heard alarmed cries coming from the temple, and glanced again at the sky. There was a faint light emanating from the treetops far above, the false dawn. If this planet had one. So they'd struck more than an hour before sunrise, might even have a little cover of darkness as they made their run to the gate.

That was going to be the most dangerous part.

Villagers began pouring out of the temple in twos and threes. He was surprised so many people had been in there, unless –

One of the men had emerged carrying a staff weapon.

"Oh, for crying out loud . . ." It was barely a mutter.

Teal'c was watching that particular man closely, but he shook his head, barely perceptibly. "He was no jaffa."

And likely, if Sobek were in there having his Judge-thingy, at least a few jaffa would have been there to check things out.

O'Neill reached across his canvas vest, into a pocket on the left-hand side, and clicked onto their frequency. "Captain?"

The voice that answered didn't come through the radio. "Here, sir." He turned slightly as he heard her scrambling up the bank behind them.

Everyone that was going to flee the temple had done it by now. There hadn't been that many guards in it when they'd originally snuck in to down the shield, and the village should have still been asleep, so –

But no jaffa. He hung onto the thought. No jaffa, no gould. No judgment.

Unless they didn't wait for Sobek to get back to punish trespassers.

"Go."

They didn't need the command; the captain and the jaffa moved smoothly behind him as he hopped the small bank and landed lightly on the path directly before the temple door. It was still open, and a golden patch of firelight illuminated his boots as he half-jogged forward, P-90 up and ready.

He wasn't going to kill anyone he didn't have to, but he wasn't going to lose any more teammates on this mission.

The first three chambers were empty, as they'd been the first time he'd led his team into the temple. There were torches everywhere, reflecting on the polished marble and making the rooms seem more alight than they really were. The walls had deeply carved hieroglyphs, but he wasn't interested. The hallway from the third chamber to the audience chamber contained ankle-deep water, about which Daniel had muttered something about being 'symbolic,' but he'd paid no attention. It probably fed from an underground spring, and unless it was some sort of leaking self-destruct boobytrap he didn't care.

It made their approach audible, and he didn't like that at all.

They splashed as little as they could through the twenty-five yard corridor, slowing as they approached another lit doorway. O'Neill caught Teal'c's eye, and he nodded, turning his back to them to guard their retreat. Carter gave him a nod, her weapon at the ready, and he proceeded into the main audience chamber.

It wasn't quite the way he remembered it. But there was no gould sitting on the throne. There were no jaffa in the room.

There were shadows, retreating down the corridor on the other end of the chamber.

And there was Daniel.

He was laying on his back on the heavily slanted scale, his arms and legs dangling off the edges of the flat, gilded plate, with his booted toes almost brushing the marble floor. Beneath the scale was a sizable pool of blood, old and bearing evidence of drag-marks and footprints. A newer puddle was forming to the right, beneath Jackson's limp left wrist. Even as they entered the room, he saw another few drops of blood trickle from the archeologist's knuckles to join the others.

Shit.

They both headed directly for him, and Jack stilled his mouth as it started to order her to watch the opposite door. He needed her to check the panel. Technically he should be the one to proceed down that second corridor, considering he was sure the armory was down there. That's where the zat had come from, anyway.

But he just didn't feel right about leaving her and Daniel alone in the room for a second time. Nothing good had come of it.

Daniel's glasses were crooked and dirty, but amazingly still intact, and they didn't hide much of his face. His jaw was slack and his skin was pale beneath the bruises, but a quick check revealed a regular pulse. The wound in his shoulder was bleeding freely, however, and did not appear to have been tended at all.

They didn't really have time to field-dress it, but he wouldn't make a half-hour run to the gate, either.

He didn't dare leave that corridor unmanned.

"Captain –"

But she'd anticipated him. After staring at Daniel for a few seconds, she had already bent, and hesitated only slightly before running her finger along the edge of the hidden panel, drawing a line through the blood that had pooled there until she found the release.

The marble slid back without a noise, lubricated with cold, congealing blood, and revealed . . . darkness.

Looked like the power was out, at any rate.

Carter stared it for only a second before she tucked her P-90 out of the way, reaching into the pockets beneath her vest. He saw that her hands were shaking, and she wiped blood onto her uniform as she groped for her compactly folded first aid kit.

"We need to dress the wound, sir."

"Do you best you can, Captain." If he could buy her three minutes to get the field down, he could buy her three minutes to save Daniel.

He forced himself back across the chamber, briefly glancing around the corner before jerking back into the chamber. He'd seen a face, and he stared at the wall opposite him, where the zat blast that had chased him out only hours before had charred a bit of dust on the marble wall across from him.

A zat was one thing. A staff weapon was something else entirely.

O'Neill whistled, looking across the room to the opposite door. In a few seconds he could make out Teal'c. He unhooked a grenade from his vest, held it up. The jaffa nodded and retreated back down the way they'd come.

He'd keep the front door open.

Jack pulled the pin, still holding the lever closed, and waited.

A glance at Carter told him she was just about ready. He'd seen her work fast before, but her fingers were flying now, filling the wound with antibiotic cream, pressing the gauze down tightly. He was going to tell her to just tape it when he saw her going for the roll.

Of course, she had both sides of his shoulder to worry about. Packing one wasn't really going to help.

He didn't hear any footsteps, but something made him turn his head, take another glance into the corridor. Energy from a zat cruised by his face, barely missing him, and he almost dropped the grenade as he yanked himself back.

"Carter!"

It was like time was repeating itself.

Only this time he wasn't running. He yanked the P-90 off his neckstrap, leveled it around the corner, and let a quick spray loose blind.

"Ready, sir!"

He tossed the grenade, gently, so that it wouldn't roll far enough down the corridor to be kicked back to them, and then he ran for the scales, clipping the weapon back to his uniform with practiced ease.

She'd pushed Daniel up into a sitting position and O'Neill barely paused as he thrust his head beneath Daniel's right arm, shouldered him in the gut, and straightened.

Carter had let go of the archeologist as soon as she'd been sure he had a good grasp, and she was facing the far door when the grenade blew.

The wind of it extinguished one of the torches, and the blast itself was teeth-rattling. The temple held, like he knew it would, and the two of them bolted for the near corridor.

They splashed down the tunnel, running almost shoulder to shoulder, and he didn't dare glance at her. It was hard enough keeping his feet without the dead weight on his shoulder, and already he was winded. Damn thin air.

Teal'c's gould seemed to make him impervious. They'd make better time to the gate if the jaffa took him.

He was more than slightly surprised that neither of them were taken down by a staff or zat by the time they hit the end of the flooded corridor, and they both dodged to their right to get out of line of sight of the corridor. Teal'c was waiting for them in the next chamber, and his frown was pronounced.

"Several men are approaching, O'Neill."

Shit.

"Carter, take point!"

She brushed past him without hesitating, heading towards the door of the temple, and wordlessly the jaffa circled behind him. They traded the unconscious, boneless Jackson without difficulty. The jaffa kept his staff weapon and O'Neill didn't protest. He could handle it one-handed; Jack had seen him do it.

"Go!"

As soon as Teal'c had a secure grip on Dr. Jackson, Carter had headed outside, and he heard several groups of reports as she fired short bursts. He heard an answering zat, but the automatic fire continued, and he kept his back against Teal'c, looking back the way they'd come.

The corridor was dim; the smoke from the grenade explosion had finally been moved to this chamber by some kind of air handling system. He hadn't heard any splashing from the corridor now two chambers behind them, but he wasn't sure he would have over the gunfire. Teal'c was starting to edge out, and Jack moved with him.

Carter was making headway. But she was taking her dear sweet time about it.

Movement caught his eye, and a shadow crawled towards them out of the smoke. The first thing to become visible was an armed staff weapon, held assuredly and with small hands. As the figure completely emerged he jerked to a stop, and they locked eyes.

Jack squeezed the trigger.

It happened too slowly. He could almost see the bullet, spinning like a well-thrown football, the rotation lending it accuracy and distance. He watched the staff weapon start its glow, indicating that the trigger had been pressed in the same second that his had begun to spring back.

The lead slug flew past the outstretched staff weapon as though it wasn't there, choosing instead to race for the body behind it. It shattered against a hard bone clavicle, penetrating deep into the chest. Its fragments found homes in a heart, in a lung, in a blood vessel. They didn't have the power to continue through the body to find another target, even though that body tried to help, carried itself backwards as though continuing the journey south.

But the body was not thrown into a rotation, not released with an explosion of gunpowder. He was just skin, blood, and bone, he soon crashed towards the earth. The boy struck the ground so hard O'Neill could feel the impact through two inches of field-issue rubber soles.

The staff weapon was pulled backwards, unable to vomit its load of deadly fire at him, and the blast emerged, white-hot and furious, and struck the ambivalent ceiling.

A few sparks, tiny pieces of shattered, burning rock, and then quiet.

He took a step back, didn't feel Teal'c's back against his. Then he turned and started running.

He didn't look back.

- . -

"How're you feeling, son?"

Daniel couldn't quite get used to that address, considering he was long past twenty and the general he never called George wasn't much over fifty, if even. He suspected it was one of the few military-approved casual addresses the general could offer, and he usually took it to mean that the following conversation was 'off the record,' so to speak.

Which was odd, considering he figured the general was here to collect the report he'd finished writing about twenty minutes ago.

"Better, General. Thanks."

Teal'c, of all people, had followed the general in, his hands clasped loosely behind his back and his arms bulging out of the short-sleeves of his military-issue black teeshirt. The jaffa had gained some bulk in the last year, as apparently he had little to do besides work in the gym.

And watch the base media library. He needed to remember to write a complaint to the officer in charge of acquisition. He'd get his educational documentaries yet, darn it.

"Dr. Frasier tells me you're expected to make a full recovery."

She'd said the same to him, cautioning about physical therapy for a while. Currently he was very happily, slightly doped on pain meds, and he was figuring he was going to feel quite a bit worse in the next few days, and should enjoy the relatively pain-free time while he could.

"Yes, sir. Oh, here's your report."

The general chuckled, accepting the offered folder. "Thank you, Dr. Jackson." His expression was warm, and his smile said things he didn't. "I'm giving SG-1 a little downtime, so your next assignment will be issued at 0800 next Tuesday."

Daniel nodded.

"I'm sure it's in here," and the general waved the small folder, "but just out of curiosity, did you see any evidence while you were prisoner that the goa'uld had been to the planet recently?"

Good question. No jaffa, no dust on the throne but none on the scales, either . . .

"Not really," he finally volunteered. "They invoked his name a few times . . . I don't know if he's returning, but I know they think he will."

The general nodded, still with that odd almost-smile. "Well, I'll let you get some rest. Let me know if there's anything you need."

"Er, thank you, General."

He watched the odd, bald man head out after reaching up to pat Teal'c on the shoulder, wondering what he'd just missed.

The jaffa inclined his head as the general left, remaining standing at the foot of Daniel's bed.

"Are you well, Daniel Jackson?"

He nodded, looking around for the little remote control that would let him sit back a little more. He'd put himself mostly upright to write, and it was starting to make his left shoulder ache.

He located it hovering about two inches from his right hand.

Daniel blinked, then followed the hand offering it, up an arm, a shoulder, a neck, a face.

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it." Jack nodded to Teal'c, who nodded back, and Daniel eyed the curtain to his right where the colonel had apparently snuck in behind.

He kept his Wizard of Oz joke to himself, and reclined the bed a little, still sitting up. He was a little drowsy, but it would be rude to just conk out when they'd come to say hi.

Sam had been in earlier, a quick visit, filled with awkward looks and attempted apologies. He'd interrupted every one until she'd eventually smiled a little and given up, and then patted his hand and left him to his report. He suspected she was hiding in her lab, and he also suspected Teal'c and Jack had held off visiting him until she was done.

It really wasn't her fault. They hadn't known. And so he got shot. And beaten. It probably wasn't the last time, and they'd probably all been shot at least once before now anyway, so the way he figured it, he was just playing catch-up.

Speaking of which –

"Hey, Jack?"

"Yeah?"

"You know that shooting range you keep talking about?"

The colonel was doing that not-smiling thing, and Daniel felt suddenly self-conscious. Did he have something stuck to his face? Was there a bruise in an amusing shape or something?

"Oh yes."

That didn't sound good.

Teal'c stepped closer to the foot of the bed. "I wish to apologize-"

He shook his head, holding up his right hand to forestall the jaffa. He was touched that they all felt responsible, but there was no hiding the fact that this was just as much his fault as everyone else's. He'd wanted to save them. He'd wanted to believe Kya, he'd wanted to go into the temple. He hadn't been good enough with his weapon. He should probably be apologizing to Jack – again – for being a crappy soldier.

"It's not your fault, Teal'c."

The jaffa seemed to be standing on the balls of his feet, his weight shifted forward. "Had I-"

"It's okay."

The jaffa frowned a little, but inclined his head politely, and Daniel flashed him a small smile. "Thanks for coming back and getting me."

"You didn't think we were going to leave you there, didja?"

The tone was light, the expression was light. There was nothing there that would have given anyone any indication it was anything other than an offhand comment, a teasing comment.

But he heard it. He heard it, and he knew exactly what it meant.

He looked up at Jack, tried to read those dark eyes. "For a minute I thought I wouldn't be there when you did." He paused, then tried for a half-smile. "We'll find them, Jack. We'll get them back."

The colonel's eyes changed, ever so subtly, and Daniel almost kicked himself.

Kya.

Jack was going to shut down, blame himself for believing the kid, for wanting him to be Skaara. Kya was going to undo every bit of good that Abydonian boy had done the colonel. Daniel thought back to the man he'd first met, more than two years ago, and said the only thing that came to mind.

"You didn't know-"

The colonel waved his hand, as though he were still engaged in the conversation, but Daniel could see him visibly withdrawing. "I know."

"We have to go back, Jack. We can save them –"

"Daniel, I don't think they want to be saved." Less light. More military.

"They're afraid. Imagine if we'd just walked up to Kasuf without that amulet-"

"Carter brought back some of the naquadah ore." The tone was flat, but not unkind. "The naquadah to rock ratio means we'd have to mine the planet for years to get enough to . . . armor a tank."

"But the –"

"I think they made their position pretty plain, Daniel." More final, and Jack headed towards the door. Teal'c moved accommodatingly away from the foot of the bed, and O'Neill turned, laying a hand on the end of the bedframe.

Daniel tried again. "Jack, they can't all be Kasuf. I know. They can't all be Skaara." He knew he'd gone too far, but Jack had to understand. "It doesn't mean they're not worth saving."

O'Neill's eyes became flat. Just like that.

"Take it easy, Daniel. I'll see you in the range as soon as your shoulder's up for it."

The colonel left, without looking at either of them, and Teal'c regarded Daniel silently until the door had closed behind him.

Daniel sighed in exasperation. "Surely he's got to-"

"O'Neill understands well your words," the jaffa said softly. "I believe he weighs the difference between the worth of strangers and the worth of friends."

Fin

Author's notes: It was only after I picked these prompts from a group of three (and you're wondering how the hell I could have picked them without noticing) that I realized how similar they were to the previous fic I wrote for thehallway. It was not intentional, and I apologize for that! I don't think Nanda or Karen had read my previous one yet or maybe they would have caught me or smacked me upside the head and told me to pick something else. )


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